The Internet is transforming corporate architectures. Businesses are now recreating themselves to become more efficient and to find new business opportunities. For example, businesses are moving existing processes such as order entry processes onto the Internet while simultaneously incorporating entirely new processes such as email-based customer support into their computing systems. By shifting some tasks onto the Web and then integrating them with existing client/server or mainframe applications, businesses are transforming into an eBusiness with a unified enterprise computing system.
The development of a unified enterprise computing system is a long and complex process, especially for large businesses. Extensive planning is needed to determine the amount of configuration required to meet the organization's business strategy and to standardize processes across the organization. In addition, a typical organization has numerous business requirements, and it is a challenge to uncover these business requirements and implement them in a controlled phase approach.
Current providers of eBusiness applications have not been able to achieve much success in reducing cost and complexity of application integration and accelerating time to deployment. One of the reasons for this inability is that a company is rarely convinced that an eBusiness application offered by the provider satisfies the company's business needs. As a result, the provider has to go through a lengthy process of collecting the company's business requirements, making significant changes to the application in accordance to the business requirements and deploying the modified application. Furthermore, because different organizations have different business requirements and employ different strategy, the provider typically has to repeat this inefficient and costly process for each customer.